Large Data Center Coming to India, As Regional Demand Booms

IDG News Service — Tulip Data Center Services is setting up a 900,000 square foot (83,612.7 square meters) data center in Bangalore, the largest in India, to benefit from scale and target growing demand for collocation, cloud, and managed services in India and neighboring countries.

Some 75,000 square feet of "raised floor space" that could be occupied by IT systems and networking racks is already available, and top multinational companies including IBM and Hewlett-Packard have signed up as customers, said H.S. Bedi, chairman and managing director of Tulip Telecom, the parent company, in a phone interview on Tuesday.

IBM was the design consultant for the data center which, has a power usage effectiveness of 1.5., Bedi said. PUE measures the energy efficiency of a data center by dividing the total power consumption of the data center, including cooling and lighting systems, by the power consumption of IT systems.

Tulip's strategy is to sign up large system integrators and service providers which in turn sell the data center services to businesses and other customers, said Ravikant Sharma, an analyst at IDC in India.

Tulip will benefit from economies of scale, as other third-party data centers in India are typically smaller, with up to 175,000 square feet of area, Sharma said.

The data center is already attracting both local businesses and foreign companies that have operations in the country. Customers in the Middle East and South East Asia are also looking to set up data recovery centers at the Tulip Data City, Bedi said.

Indian data center capacity is poised to touch 6.6 million square feet by 2016, with service providers driving majority of the growth, Gartner said in November. The data center colocation and hosting market in India is estimated to reach US$609 million this year and $1.3 billion in 2016, according to the research firm.

Tulip will increase the raised floor space as the orders come in. It has already sold 16 percent of the raised floor space and by March next year it will have sold about 25 percent of the space. It hopes to achieve full capacity of 400,000 raised floor space in less than two years.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com